Professor Jack van Honk PhD (Utrecht) FISN

Social and Clinical Neuroscience

Professor of Clinical Neuroscience, Department of Psychiatry and Member, Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine (IDM), Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Cape Town, South Africa; Professor of Social Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, Utrecht University (UU), The Netherlands.

Jack van Honk’s research is in the fields of Social and Affective Neuroscience (Human Neuroscience), focusing on the psychobiology of human social-emotional behaviour, with the aim of developing new biological treatments for the psychopathologies of fear and aggression. During his career he has developed a multidisciplinary set of methodologies which have applied in psychological, psychiatric and neuroscientific research. He was the first researcher worldwide to use both hormonal manipulation and brain stimulation techniques to get direct insight into the psychobiological mechanisms underlying human fear and aggression.

In South Africa he is project leader on the research into Urbach-Wiethe disease, a rare genetic syndrome (knock-out-of-function mutation of the ECM1 gene), which causes bilateral calcification of the basolateral amygdala, a brain hub in fear and aggression behaviours. He mostly publishes in high-impact international journals such as PNAS, Nature, Neuroimage, Human Brain Mapping, Psychological Science, Psychoneuroendocrinology, Archives of General Psychiatry and Biological Psychiatry.